The Witness You Have to Ask For
On dropping the ball and living the message
The keynote was over and the studio was quiet. Wrong quiet.
700 women had just gathered in 17 locations across the country. Melissa Washington had hosted year five of Women Veterans Engage. People had flown or driven to be in the same room with other women veterans for a shared hour. And when it ended, I reached over and clicked the camera off and sat alone in a room that had already moved on.
That was the first thing I’ll do differently.
When something matters as much as that keynote mattered, when you’ve spent months preparing not just content but an entire mindset shift for women who’ve spent years not giving themselves permission to be fully who they are, you need another body in the room. Someone who knows what’s at stake. Someone who fills the space so the room doesn’t close in on you when the camera goes dark.
Preparation can happen in isolation. Has to, sometimes. The clarity required to build something real doesn’t survive too many voices too early. But there’s a difference between preparing in solitude and finishing alone. My wedding day taught me the same thing. I did my own hair. Dressed myself. Chose quiet because I needed it. But the ten minutes before you walk through a door that doesn’t open twice, well, that’s not the time to be by yourself. That’s the time to need a witness.
Yesterday I didn’t have one. And I felt it.
Here’s the other thing that happened.
The audio didn’t play on any of the videos.
Seven soundbites. A montage. A live demo of Digital Shelly. Women who had trusted me with their stories and had been waiting to see themselves in that room with those other women, on that screen, their voices carrying the proof that this framework is real and that it works. None of it made it through. The tech check the day before had been clean. I’d done everything right. And still, what the women in those 17 locations saw was me, talking. My face. My words. The keynote I had specifically designed to not be a Shelly talking head was exactly that.
Ten minutes. That’s about what I let myself sit in it.
And in those 10 minutes, the last thing I wanted was a witness.
The phone was face down. Messages were coming in (I could feel the vibration of them), friends telling me I’d done well, that it landed, that they were proud. I didn’t want to read them. I wanted to sit inside the feeling of having failed, and I wanted to stay there. There was also something pulling in the other direction, an instinct to pick up the phone and flood my friends with everything that had gone wrong. To unload it before I’d even processed it.
But what we put out into the world becomes our truth. And somewhere underneath the feeling, in a place that doesn’t speak in sentences, I knew the message had gotten where it needed to go. Preaching failure to the world wasn’t honest. It was just loud. It would have put the spotlight on me instead of on the women those videos were made for.
The feeling was real. The feeling was not the whole truth.
So I sat with it for 10 minutes. And then I got to work.
Then I uploaded both videos to YouTube and posted the links in the event app. Emailed the host directly. Emailed every woman who had a cameo in those videos and had been expecting to see herself. Texted the host and offered to edit. She said yes. Downloaded her recording, cut in every video that hadn’t played, and delivered a finished version back to her before the day was done.
The follow-up email going out today includes it. A cleaner version. An even better one.
The reason I’m telling you this isn’t to walk you through a good recovery. The reason is the 10 minutes.
You’re going to stand in a moment where something you built with everything you had doesn’t go the way you built it to go. The drop will happen. What happens in the 10 minutes after it is the thing that’s yours to control. If you spend those 10 minutes deciding what the drop means about you, you’ll still be in that conversation an hour later. If you spend them asking what you can still do, you might just end up delivering something better than what you planned.
Mission accomplished. The form just changed.
The women who came to that event to be welcomed into a new way of seeing themselves, one that asks for complete self-acceptance instead of one more standard to meet, they got that keynote today. In a format they can watch again. In something they can share.
My friend, preparation is yours alone. The finish line is not. Put someone in the room next time.
That evening I drove to a graduation party.
A woman veteran I’ve known for years had a son walking through a door that doesn’t open twice. He graduated from the same high school I attended. She didn’t know anything about the keynote. The backyard was full of family, food and noises of a day that belongs entirely to someone else. And that’s exactly where my focus stayed.
Five years ago, I couldn’t use the word “friend” to describe her. Not out loud. The word felt too exposed, too much to ask for, too risky to claim. Women veterans will know exactly what I mean by that. Somewhere between the military and the civilian world, that word gets complicated. You learn to hold people at a careful distance and call it professionalism. You learn to need people without saying so. You learn that asking for connection is somehow the most vulnerable thing you can do, more vulnerable than anything the uniform ever asked of you.
She moved into my neighborhood. Our sons grew up together. And last night, I stood in her backyard and watched her family celebrate her eldest.
The keynote I spent months building was about this. About welcoming women veterans into a self-perception that has room for all of it — the strength and the longing, the service and the self, the mission and the friendship that is allowed to just be a friendship. That’s what I was trying to give the 700 women in those 17 locations. And the technology failed… and the videos didn’t play… and I sat alone in a quiet studio and felt the weight of that.
And then I drove to a backyard and stood next to my friend.
The message is important. Living it out is the most important thing.
Yesterday I did both, and one of them went exactly as planned.
I'm Shelly Rood, and Mission Wildflower lives here. If this landed with you, please tell me in the comments. If you're a woman veteran ready to stop processing alone, the complimentary Be At Ease, Woman Veteran™ peer community is where that work happens with women who get it: womanveteranstrong.org
You didn't crawl into a hole when it didn't go as planned, when the camera turned off. You improvised to finish the mission you worked so to hard to plan and execute. And it was brilliant! Pivot, adapt and overcome - Well Done! This is how you do "excellence".
Always completing the mission… you don’t quit ❤️